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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

Here's the full press release from the Police force:

https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/news/city-of-london/news/...

> Sci-Hub is a series of websites that enable free access to over 70 million published scientific papers of all disciplines. It is estimated that it includes 80% or more of the world’s currently published scientific papers, with the volume of data being roughly two and a half times the size of Wikipedia.

Fantastic!

> Sci-Hub obtains the papers through a variety of malicious means, such as the use of phishing emails to trick university staff and students into divulging their login credentials. Sci Hub then use this to compromise the university’s network and download the research papers.

A) Is this true?

B) If so, is it a bad thing?

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It's a rumour people working with the traditional academic publishers have been spreading, but I haven't been able to find any proof. All I got when asking for it was "the evidence exists, but there is no gain in publicizing it": https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/12/21/wakeup-call-l...

A) Almost certainly not. No doubt phished/otherwise involuntarily obtained credentials end up in their database, and people that voluntarily contribute their credentials when pressured will lie about their contribution to the authorities. But there's no evidence that sci-hub itself is behind any attacks.

B) Yes, but only due to the potential sensitive nature of the credentials unrelated to the downloading of papers.

This would be news to me, but it would explain a lot. It always seemed unlikely that Sci-Hub’s archive was entirely contributed by concerned citizens.

Phishing, though, crosses the line. Once you start tricking people and removing their agency, you’re the bad guy.

I feel like it's more likely someone got caught by their org noticing their credentials being used to dl ridiculous amounts of papers, and fell back on the "wow, that's so weird; I must have been hacked" excuse.

> It always seemed unlikely that Sci-Hub’s archive was entirely contributed by concerned citizens.

Note that Sci-Hub's model wasn't concerned citizens uploading articles, but academics (allegedly, at least) sharing their credentials and Sci-Hub using those to download requested articles if they didn't have it in their own caches yet. With that method, it seems a lot less unlikely to me that a relatively small number of academics could have "contributed" many articles.

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